Verizon has announced the forthcoming launch of prepaid data for smartphones and new prepaid data plansfor LTE service. This comes months after it began offering its own flat-rate prepaid offering to compete with MetroPCS and Cricket limited to select feature phones.

The smartphone plan starts at $80 a month with 1GB of data access as well as unlimited voice and messaging service and is being marketed alongside the currently available Samsung Illusion Android smartphone, which is a midrange smartphone featuring Android Gingerbread and a 1GHz processor for $169.99. The phone and plan will be available starting tomorrow, May 1st online and in-store with a future rollout to Best Buy, Target, RadioShack and Walmart locations nationwide.

This marks the first time that Verizon Wireless will actively offer data access for smartphones on a monthly prepaid plan as the carrier was loathe to make any significant moves in the rapidly competitive sector for fear of cannibalizing its more lucrative postpaid sales. It’s previous attempt to offer service on a no-contract basis relied on a hybrid monthly plan that mirrored postpaid service and still required a credit check.

It’s worth noting that the Jetpack plans are still terrible compared to using a grandfathered smartphone SIM card, and abandoning the voice minutes.

You can take over someone’s Verizon plan (with unlimited data, and say a 3G smartphone) for free or even make a little money. Then swap the device to a 4G smartphone (borrow from someone), and finally drop the voice plan to the lowest level (450 minutes, or the $20 plan if you’re over 65).

Final cost should be $39 + $30 unlimited data = $69. If you use more than 3 GB/month of data, taking over someone’s grandfathered plan, and SIM-swapping to a Jetpack is still way cheaper… oh, and it’s unlimited.

“Customers who do not have dedicated Mobile Broadband devices cannot tether other devices to laptops or personal computers for use as wireless modems unless they subscribe to Mobile Broadband Connect”

I definitally agree its cheaper to pop it into a 4g LTE iPad, but not sure you’ll get hotspot on the MiFi without subscribing to Mobile Broadband Connect. If nothing else, I’d expect the service to be terminated should they discover the SIM being used for MiFi w/o the subscription.

It would be interesting to find out if anyone is using their smartphone SIM in their MiFi w/o having the hotspot feature.